The python dropped his head lightly for a moment on Mowgli’s shoulders. “A brave heart and a courteous tongue,” said he. “They shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling.
I’m only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words – I can’t do that. That’s a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, ‘An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician – but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.
Perhaps the story now goes on beyond the book.
Never develop a passion you can’t afford. It’ll eat your heart away like a bookworm.
Some of the other mudlarks also swore that Ofelia Fuente’s mother was a Witch, but they said that about almost every woman, especially the ones who managed to make a living for themselves.
Men liked to claim how different they were, yet they were all so alike.
Their dust was in high demand, as it gave sweet dreams, but Tabetha couldn’t afford to get lost in them. Those dreams were only lies anyway, and waking up from them only made facing reality harder.
Resa longed for the kitchen, always full of the humming of the oversize fridge, for mo’s workshop in the garden, and the armchair in the library where you could sit and visit strange worlds without getting lost in them.
He sought her lips as if he needed to breathe through her, as if only she could keep him from choking on his rage.
The road went ever more steeply downhill. Overhead, the branches of the trees intertwined. It was a still, windless morning, cloudy and damp.
Although it’s not just plants and animals that die out, so do books. Quite often, I’m sorry to say. I’m sure you could fill a hundred houses like this one to the roof with all the books that have disappeared forever.
Life seemed so much stronger than death, death so much stronger than life. Like the ebb and flow of the tide.
If ye see the laird, tell him what ye hear; tell him this makes the twelve hunner and nineteen time that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on him and his house, byre and stable, man, guest and master, wife, miss, or bairn – black, black be their fall.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped.
The best lies stay close to the truth.
The unicorns lifted their heads. Of course they weren’t white. Why were things in this world always white-washed? Their hides were brown and grey, mottled black, and pale yellow like the autumn sun drifting through the damp fog above.
He closed the window, and the scents of the past again flooded the room, like a bunch of wilted flowers.
Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.
The wheels of the pocket watch began to move in their perfect rhythm, confirming once again that there was no end to well-kept order. Immortality was clean and precise. For sure it didn’t need a heart. A heartbeat became irregular so easily and at the end it stopped, however carefully one treated it.
The Dark Fairy touched her chest. No heart, like her sisters. So where did the love come from?
What terrible human presumption it is to catch other living creatures and hold them captive!